Aaron King and Conrad Lagrange looked at each other, for a moment, in questioning silence. The artist laughed. "Our poor little mystery," he said.
But the novelist--as they went toward the house--cursed Mrs. Taine, James Rutlidge, and all their kin and kind, with a vehement earnestness that startled his companion--familiar as the latter was with his friend's peculiar talent in the art of vigorous expression.
After dinner, that evening, the painter and the novelist sat on the porch--as their custom was--to watch the day go out of the sky and the night come over valley and hill and mountain until, above the highest peaks, the stars of God looked down upon the twinkling lights of the towns of men. At that hour, too, it was the custom, now, for the violinist hidden in the orange grove, to make the music they both so loved.
In the music, that night, there was a feeling that, to them, was new--a vague, uncertain, halting undertone that was born, they felt, of fear. It stirred them to question and to wonder. Without apparent cause or reason, they each oddly connected the troubled tone in the music with the stopping of the automobile from Fairlands Heights, that afternoon, at the gate of the little house next door--the artist, because of Mrs. Taine's insistent inquiry about the, to him, unknown musician;--Conrad Lagrange, because of the manner of the girl in the garden when James Rutlidge appeared and because of the critic's interest when they had spoken of the violinist in the studio. But neither expressed his thought to the other.
Presently, the music ceased, and they sat for an hour, perhaps, in silence--as close friends may do--exchanging only now and then a word.
Suddenly, they were startled by a cry. In the still darkness of the night, from the mysterious depths of the orange grove, the sound came with such a shock that the two men, for the moment, held their places, motionless--questioning each other sharply--"What was that?" "Did you hear?"--as though they doubted, almost, their own ears.
The cry came again; this time, undoubtedly, from that neighboring house to the west. It was unmistakably the cry of a woman--a woman in fear and pain.
Again the cry came from the black depths of the orange grove--shuddering, horrible--in an agony of fear.